This week in my creative writing course (shout out, Gotham Writers Workshops), we opened with an exercise to get the juices flowing. Our instructor, Cleve Lamison, gave us the following prompt: Write about something or someone you feel passionate about. It can be a person, a cause, a place, a memory, a hobby, a belief, or even something strange and specific that matters deeply to you. Do not worry about being polished. Do not worry about grammar. Chase the feeling.

With the prompt in the Zoom chat, he started a fifteen-minute timer. We each went off camera and started writing.

At first, I was unsure what to write about. There’s so much that I feel passionate about– Appalachia, the climate, corruption, justice, my family, my partner, my dog, books, writing, oil paints, the fact that towels should chiefly be absorbent and not too soft.

Despite the wealth of things I could have written about, when I put my fingers on the keyboard and let myself write without thinking too hard about what I was writing, there were two topics that poured out onto the page.

Willa Cather and the 2000 film Charlie’s Angels.

For the first few paragraphs, I felt quite silly. I was laughing at myself for having the audacity to put the McG film in the same category as one of the most important writers in the American canon.

Yet the more I wrote, the more it made sense. Both Willa Cather and the angels exposed me to new ways of being that diverged from how I’d come to make sense of the world.

From Willa, through the lens of her narrator, Jim Burden, in My Ántonia, I found a kindred spirit who was concerned with making sense of where one comes from and how the events of adolescence shape the rest of one's life. Importantly, it was at a time when I, an adolescent, was trying to wrap my head around the same things, but didn’t have the language or experience to do so effectively.

And the angels– especially Lucy Liu, whom I still adore to this day– exposed me to the idea of there being power in femininity, which, up to that point, wasn’t something I saw portrayed very often.

Because I have no shame, I’ll include the in-class writing below in its raw, unedited form.

But, importantly, reflecting on my assignment shenanigans in the hours and days following class has made me realize how important it is to be exposed to and critically examine new ways of being. One of the books on my shelf that I picked up recently while visiting Savannah, Georgia, and the title of which the epigraph at the top of this issue comes from is Ways of Being by James Bridle. In it, Bridle questions what it means to be intelligent, particularly in light of AI and all the market-influencing jargon that gets spat out around it.

Bridle, importantly, expands his analysis of intelligence to consider the natural world alongside humans and machines.

His book acknowledges that we’re only just becoming aware of the other intelligences that have been with us all along, even if we’ve failed to recognize or acknowledge them. These others—the animals, plants, and natural systems that surround us—are slowly revealing their complexity, agency, and knowledge, just as the technologies we’ve built to sustain ourselves are threatening to cause their extinction and ours. What can we learn from them, and how can we change ourselves, our technologies, our societies, and our politics to live better and more equitably with one another and the nonhuman world?

Personally, I’ve learned a lot from mushrooms (wink), so I get it when he talks about learning from every phylum and genus we can in order to make sense of the world and our place in it. Whether it’s birds, wildflowers, slime molds, crime-fighting femme fatales, or a twentieth-century prairie lesbian, it would seem that it is only through exposure to other ways of being that we imagine a better, different world to pursue.

‘Til Next Time,

-Blake

Everyone is worried about the death of reading. This Aeon piece isn't worried — it's just more precise. The attention crisis is real, but the culprit isn't screens or a generation with broken brains. It's the specific design choices of specific platforms built to fragment attention for revenue. Worth reading slowly, maybe a little defiantly.

From 2020 to 2025, the U.S. saw a 70% surge in independent bookstores! And 2025 was a blockbuster year with 422 brand-new indie shops popping up across the nation—a 31% increase from 2024!

Read more about it over on GoodGoodGood.

Exercise of the Week: The Artifact

Find the last physical book you bought or borrowed. Open it to a random page and read one paragraph. Now write — without looking back — what that paragraph was about. Not a summary: what was underneath the content? What was it really doing?

As promised, here is my in-class writing that I spoke about at the top of the issue— fully unedited for your enjoyment.

***

I’m torn between writing about Willa Cather or the first Charlies Angels movie. In some ways, I guess both are intertwined in my psyche- seminal texts that influenced who I would become and who I am. I’ll start with Charlie’s Angels. There’s a running joke among my close friends that I think Charlie’s Angels is the greatest film ever created. And it’s true. I do. I can quote it all almost from memory, and can give a play by play across the entire film-- how it opens on an airplane that, even for a pre-9/11 flight, makes very little sense.

Why was LL Cool J walking up to first class once they were already in the sky? Why was the catty flight attendant having a conversation about passengers in the galley? Why was LL Cool J wearing a dashiki? What was the bad guy’s plan? He gets diamonds, but he’s also wearing a bomb vest, so the hand-off makes no sense since it implies that he’s both trying to get some kind of profit and blow himself up. And then they jump out of the plane with no negative side effects on the other passengers, presumably implying that the catty, campy flight attendant is able to pull the door shut after their departure, despite the air pressure and the fact that they’re moving at several hundred miles per hour.

So much of that film makes absolutely zero sense, and it’s hardly a win for feminism when every woman on screen is either a nun or a sex kitten (rewatch it… those are literally the only two archetypes for women in the film), and they’re all indirectly reporting to or controlled by men. And yet, when I originally watched it, far younger than the intended audience, I thought it was such an amazing action movie because it was so different from the action movies I’d catch glimpses of on television when my dad was watching them. It wasn’t gruff, manly men in a war. It was three women, fully feminine and fully powerful, doing kung fu in high fashion looks. It was drag. And I was captivated, especially by Lucy Liu, since her character was the more reserved, nerdy one of the trio, and I related to that. 

But what about Willa Cather? Cather’s writing career spanned from roughly 1912 to her death in the late 1940s (I want to say 1947, but may be mistaken). I was a bit older when I first encountered her work, but not much. My Antonia, a reading assignment in a high school American literature class. I was about fifteen at the time, I believe. At first, I thought the book was fairly dull. Nothing happened in the conventional plot-driven sense, and I wasn’t sure why the book took so many forays into these little vignettes away from the narrator– the Russians, the Swedish girls, Wick Cutter, Jim’s college days. But by the time I reached the end of it, it stuck with me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, but wasn’t really sure why. There was something about the book that resonated, but it was like having a word on the tip of my tongue. It was there, I just couldn’t put shape to it or articulate why this book impacted me so much. 

With  a few re-reads and the distance of a few years, I realized that there was a lot to My Antonia that made it resonate. For one, the prose is absolutely beautiful. Cather has this very crystalline voice that’s simple yet sharp, observant and reverent without being overly flowery or sounding concerned with itself (though it was certainly concerned with itself– in her essay, The Novel Demuble, she opines about the distinction between commercial fiction and art, and makes her opinion very clear that she sees mass market fiction as a waste of her time). Beyond the prose, though, My Antonia is written from the perspective of a narrator who is looking back on his life and recalling the events and people of his childhood and adolescence that shaped who he would ultimately become and the fertile soil from which the rest of his life grew, and I read it at a time where I was wrestling with questions about who I wanted to become and how I would rectify my roots in the foothills of Appalachia in a working class family with the aspirations I had for a life of excitement and glamour. 

I also attribute my decision to pivot from pre-med to English to My Antonia. My poor mother was terrified by that bit of influence, but I think I’ve since proven that I was able to make it work. 

The connection between Willa Cather and Charlie’s angels is still unclear to me. Why I wanted to write about both of them and couldn’t decide which got me more excited is probably a reflection of something I should speak to my therapist about.  But, in both cases, these four women– Willa Cather, Lucy Liu, Cameron Diaz, and Drew Barrymore– were glimpses into firsts, showing me new ways of being of thinking of finding my place in the world.